FEATURE BINDING IN VISUAL MODALITY DEPENDS ON ATTENTION: A MISMATCH NEGATIVITY STUDY

The current study aimed to find out whether attention is required for visual feature binding. Participants performed a visual discrimination task with Gabor grates, which differed in two features: spatial frequency and angle. Detection of deviant stimuli against standards was possible exclusively by feature conjunctions rather than by separate features. We analyzed event-related potentials under four experimental conditions: selective attention to the target stimulus; selective ignoring of the non-target stimulus; nonselective distributed attention to all stimuli within visual modality; cross modal shift of attention from the visual to the audial modality. Mismatch negativity was present only in conditions of attention to visual stimuli both selective and distributed. The finding evidences that feature binding occurred only under conditions of attention towards visual stimuli.